coping with illness – Page 3

Busting Grandma Out

S.E. Street September 19, 2014 3 Comments

S.E. Street I had been in London on business all of seven hours when my son, Tom, called me at two in the morning from our hometown, Sydney, Australia. “Grandma’s had a fall. She’s been taken to the hospital, but she’s all right.” My mother’s having a fall was nothing unusual; she had always been an unpredictable fainter. My husband and children and I called it her party trick, making light of it to soothe her embarrassment. She had no recollection of these episodes; one minute she’d be seated at the table, and the next, she’d be lying on her back on the floor, her feet propped up on a chair, with the family smiling down at her as if she were Sleeping Beauty awakening

Fateful Encounter

Amy Eileen Hiscock August 1, 2014 13 Comments

Amy Eileen Hiscock I cannot take my eyes from his face. It has been destroyed in the wreck, along with the rest of his body. His head is misshapen, bloodied. Someone has tried to staple together one of the larger lacerations–extending diagonally across his face and under his chin–but there was little point. They gave up partway through. I have never seen a dead body. I am twenty-five and in the second of five terms of nursing school.

Lightheaded

Ellen Cole June 13, 2014 5 Comments

Ellen Cole Lightheaded, as I so often am when leukemia fevers sweep over me,I fail to notice when I begin to rise,feet bidding the floor goodbye, I say, Brian, but you,your eyes shut, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonatawhispering in your earphones, do not see me wink out the window like lamp light, the lawn glittered with glow-worms, echoed above by the stern slow music of stars.

The Pros and Cons of Living with a Terminal Illness

Ellen Diamond May 9, 2014 8 Comments

Ellen Diamond Before I retired in 2000, I worked in a state agency as a peer counselor, or more formally, an employee assistance program (EAP) coordinator. The “coordinator” part was there because my job description wasn’t actually to do counseling; it was to assess the problem and refer the client for help. But of course both of those processes involved counseling. We just couldn’t call it that. In 1986, shortly after I’d begun the job, I was separately visited by two employees with HIV/AIDS. Treatments such as the antiviral drugs used so successfully today were nearly a decade away, and a diagnosis of HIV meant almost certain death. These clients were understandably upset and frightened, but they each made it clear to me that they

Saving Grampa

Alia Moore April 25, 2014 9 Comments

Alia Moore You were supposed to die of cardiac arrest as you circled toward home plate. Or of a brain aneurysm in the summer during one of your countless hikes through the mountains. You weren’t supposed to die here. Not in a hospital bed, inhabiting this fragile new body, with an oxygen tube in your nose and tumors in your lungs. Two days before you left us, I traveled home to visit you. I’d last seen you six months before, shortly after your eighty-eighth birthday. You were a lifelong athlete and adventurer, but you seemed just a little less spry than I remembered.

Cover-up

Carol Scott-Conner April 18, 2014 9 Comments

Carol Scott-Conner “The plastic surgeons tell me that women who like to swim do much better with reconstruction than with prostheses,” says a young breast surgeon at our weekly Breast Cancer Tumor Board, the working conference where we discuss every new breast cancer patient before starting treatment. There’s a slight note of surprise in her voice; to her, it’s simply another consideration when advising women before mastectomy. For decades, the only option after a mastectomy was a prosthesis, or breast form–something shaped and weighted to fill the empty cup of the brassiere and lie, more or less comfortably, against the chest wall. I sometimes tell my patients that using a prosthesis is a bit like going back to the days when we were little girls,

Observations

Veneta Masson March 21, 2014 9 Comments

1. Mom spends all her time saying thank you. Casseroleswhole dinnersarrive at the door,notesphone callsassurances of prayerand being thereif something is needed,offers to pick up the childrenthe laundrytidy the houserun errands.

Luca

Richard Weiss October 25, 2013 13 Comments

Richard Weiss He waited, sandwiched between an angularhousewife with a cough and an accountantwhose clothing draped his skeletal frame.When we first met he was much younger, bearded, heavily tattooed, dressed in black,his bulk dwarfing my consultation room, a school custodian recovering after a painfuldivorce from a guitar-playing, nose-pierced wife

Five Years Later

Steven Lewis October 19, 2012 No Comments

Steve Lewis Evenings in the Sloan-Kettering ICU were starkly lit–nowhere to hide from the glare, bloodshot eyes trained on blinking lights, buzzing machines, masked men and women passing soundlessly through sliding glass doors, and little but hours and hours of bright, eerie luminosity ahead. By contrast, the days then were dark. No comfort to be found in the sunrise or in that old salve about everything looking better in the morning. My wife and kids and I sat on the edge of uncomfortable couches in dimly lit waiting rooms where the waiting was always either too long or never long enough; we stood shoulder to shoulder in airless elevators with strangers sharing the same muted despair; we sat huddled in the cafeteria and did not

Telling Nick

Marianne Lonsdale September 14, 2012 No Comments

Marianne Lonsdale “What’s going to happen to Catie when she grows up?” I was driving with my son, Nick, to the store when he asked this about his fifteen-year-old cousin, Catie. Nick, age eight, had just spent his spring break at Catie’s home. Blind, she was now losing her ability to talk, but she always recognized Nick’s voice. She adored having him by her side; whenever Nick walked into the room, her face lit up, and she raised her arms for hugs. She was the closest Nick was going to get to having a sibling. “Will she get a job?” he piped up from the backseat. “Or will someone still have to take care of her?” Small for his age, Nick was just about big

Five Years to a Cure

Ellen Diamond August 24, 2012 No Comments

Ellen Diamond Recently, while reading a post in an online chat group for people with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), I spotted an intriguing comment. At an important conference, a world-renowned hematologist had referred to a “five-year timeline” for a cure. This took me back fourteen years, to when I’d just been diagnosed with CLL. There was a Gilda’s Club near my workplace; I’d always passed it quickly on my way home. Now I found myself stepping through the doorway to hear a top specialist talk about my disease. I recall his closing words: “Give me five years, and I’ll give you a cure.” As desperately as I wanted to believe this pronouncement, I felt reluctant to pin my hopes on it. Fourteen years later, my

Genuine Touch

Jonathan Gotfried May 13, 2011 No Comments

Jonathan Gotfried I was a medical student doing my fourth-year rotation on the oncology floor. The floor offered many new sights, and from the first, I was struck by the two mammoth massage chairs sitting in a corner at the end of the longest corridor. Their exaggerated curves were plastered with jet-black faux leather adorned with stitching details. Long, smooth armrests of oak jutted out on either side. The remote control was a virtual supercomputer offering thousands of programs designed to enhance one’s massaging pleasure–kneading, fast, pressure, heat, full-body massage. On either side of the plush headrest, strategically placed speakers would play soft classical music, drowning out the low hum of the motor that powered the massage. Proudly, the label on the back declared these to be

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: coping with illness

Busting Grandma Out

Fateful Encounter

Lightheaded

The Pros and Cons of Living with a Terminal Illness

Saving Grampa

Cover-up

Observations

Luca

Five Years Later

Telling Nick

Five Years to a Cure

Genuine Touch

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: coping with illness

Start typing and press enter to search